It seems that every January brings with it the need to work on an older, uncompleted project. Last year it was the tool chest, before that the tool chest (yes, it took that long!), and before that was the partition wall in my shop space. This time around, the Not-Wall-Hung is getting a third look. There have been tools inside the thing, obviously, but it’s not anywhere near the state I envisioned it to be when it was declared ‘essentially complete’ in 2013. Here’s what it looked like then:

And this is as far as build-out has gotten through Christmas of 2015:

So, why the push to get this cabinet to the next level now? I guess because I added a Starrett depth gauge / protractor thingy (No. 236) to the inside of an inner door; from that point, the wheels started turning towards “next steps”. I’ve had a kinda-sorta idea on what to do with doors, nothing more.

So to move forward, let’s start by moving backwards; back to the plane shelving, through the door mounts, and wrapping up to where I am now. The shelves were always intended. What I used was some salvage walnut, one screw anchoring the middle of each from the backside of the cabinet wall. With the plan set to keep center sag at bay, a solution was needed at the ends. What I came up with was big on strength while maximizing usuable shelf space:

Doesn’t seem like much, but keeping available a full inch of space on each shelf was a very good thing.

The inside cabinet has a doorframe that was lapped for strength:

That in turn served to frame the new shelves. And I wanted doors inside that frame. Here’s the final look, featuring finials made by slicing a walnut table leg in half… Yeah, that’s the extent of the fancy aesthetic, but I like it.

The frame is put together to stay, and the doors are oak, from the Hoosier cabinet donor that started this whole Not Wall Hung project years ago.

And that brings me to the first things to appear on the new oak doors: a combination square, stair saw and monster divider. Without getting too deep into the ‘why’ for those things, I’ll just say there was no other place to put those tools that made sense. That and I wanted to try my hand at building what Tony has now called ‘tool caddies.’ When did he say that? When I added the most recent tool to the right side door: a No. 236 Starrett gauge:

That gets us up to Time Now… Next time we move onto new build outs. So until then: Thanks for Looking!

-- Don't anthropomorphize your handplanes. They hate it when you do that. -- OldTools Archive --

Steph and BHog have a process that they swear by but I haven’t tried it yet. I use a $3 hake brush from the art store and just thin it out a lot, that’s what Paul sellers recommends and it works pretty well. Very easy.